Garden Of Blog

I made Day 3 my “future of Perl” day. Last year I was impressed by Patrick Michaud’s session on the Parrot Compiler Toolkit and decided to sit in for him again. I’m not sure whether I wasn’t paying attention last year, or if Parrot has come along a lot since then, but I almost felt like I could start writing my own language using Parrot. That would be neat. They seem to have lowered the barrier to entry by abstracting away some common portions of compiler writing.

Then Damian Conway and Larry Wall did a short update on the latest design changes for Perl 6, some of which seemed kind of neat. Then Patrick Michaud again, this time with Jerry Gay to talk about Rakudo which is the Parrot implementation of a compiler for Perl 6.

All of this and more, and this evening I am a bit tired.

The highlight of Day 2, for me, was certainly Damian Conway’s “Perl Worst Practices” presentation, which was as funny as it was challenging. Damian spent several hours deconstructing his own SelfGOL program, written as an entry to a Perl obfuscation contest. It was nothing short of brilliant: an object lesson in what not to do when writing software for readability and maintainability, and simultaneously a work of art.

In the afternoon was the Catalyst session, which only left me pensive as to whether I have made the correct choices in my work.

Here I am at OSCON in Portland, Oregon… a programmer’s gathering more massive than the Perl-specific YAPC::NA I traveled to Houston for last year. I was still able to fill the entire week with Perl-related sessions to attend here at OSCON. I am currently in the Perl Security tutorial which started as a review (for me) of Perl’s “taint” function and is ending with a whole bunch of stuff I’ll most certainly need to review in the coursebook later.

It was a pleasant surprise that this morning’s “Mastering Perl” was mostly a review of concepts I was already familiar with. I decided to implement one of them, DBI profiling, in the app I’m currently working on, to see how long each database call is taking. Performance really isn’t an issue at this point, but it’s nice to have the hooks in place, especially in my common modules, to check things out anytime I need to. Now I can turn this on easily in all my apps.

Portland, incidentally, kicks Houston’s ass. While Houston is a disaster of urban sprawl, Portland seems just the opposite; just a mile or two out of town and you are back in a rich rural environment that seems intentionally underdeveloped. Perhaps the dry Texan landscape just didn’t inspire its settlers to preserve much of what they found. Portland’s rain forest vegetation seems more worth protecting at some level, although I know that logging in the northwest is a constant controversy.